Recently rediscovered in an American private collection, Les Feuillages is one of the largest and most accomplished of Larionov’s impressionist paintings and presents collectors with a rare opportunity to acquire a work from this early key period in the artist’s career. While the circumstances of how the picture came to the United States remain unclear, the Richard Feigen gallery label on the frame suggests that it has been there for several decades. The dating to circa 1903 on the label was likely provided either by the artist or his widow Alexandra Tomilina who, after his death, inscribed many of his works and issued certificates. The correct dating of Larionov’s paintings and the chronology of his artistic development remain a matter of debate even after the major Larionov retrospective at the State Tretyakov Gallery in 2018 shed new light on the question.

The late 1950s and the 1960s saw a flurry of exhibitions of Larionov’s and Goncharova’s work in commercial and public galleries, as well as new publications, finally recognising the important contribution the two artists made to the development of modern art. With renewed scholarly and commercial interest in early 20th-century modernism in the post-war era, Larionov made deliberate efforts to rewrite art history by establishing his own chronology and pre-dating both individual works and the various phases of his career. In the catalogue for the 1961 Goncharova and Larionov retrospective organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain, the curators Mary Chamot and Camilla Gray noted: ‘The dating of Larionov’s work presents a peculiar problem. Almost none of the works were dated at the time of execution, and such dates as now appear inscribed on his paintings are mostly recent and do not bear substantiation with exhibition catalogues or other of the scanty documents on which a chronology could be based. As far as it has been possible to do so, and this has been with the full cooperation of the artist himself [emphasis added], an attempt has been made to ascertain the correct dates of the works in this exhibition… (A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Designs for the Theatre. Larionov and Goncharova, London, 1961, cat.3).

While factually incorrect, the date of 1903 is consistent with Larionov’s narrative. For example, the well-documented impressionist canvas Le Verger (fig.1) is dated 1903 on the stretcher, as well as in the Acquavella Galleries catalogue for Larionov's 1969 New York exhibition. It is also worth noting that even Larionov’s Russian period works are titled in French in the catalogue for the Acquavella show, and French titles are found on the reverses of many such works and can often be attributed to Tomilina. The title Les Feuillages on the label of the present work would most likely also have come from her.

During the first decade of the 20th century, Larionov spent several summers at his grandparents' house near Tiraspol. Here, he painted a series of works, impressionist in style, of their garden, roses, and trees, to which the present work belongs. While it is difficult to date individual paintings, these canvases first appear at exhibitions and are reproduced in exhibition catalogues and magazines in 1906. Most of Larionov’s oils from this period are more modest in size and it is interesting to note that the dimensions of the present work are almost identical to those of Acacia Trees in Spring (fig.2; State Russian Museum, measuring 120 by 132.2cm), which the artist showed together with other impressionist works at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1906.

The sunlit leaves and the overall interest in light show the influence of the French Impressionists, whose work Larionov would have known from exhibitions in Russia and Sergei Shchukin’s collection. Yet the palette of greens, blues, and silvery greys, as well as the overall preoccupation with purely painterly ideas and decorative aspects of the paint surface, indicate a shift from Impressionism towards Symbolism and reveal the influence of artists such as Viktor Borisov-Musatov. When compared to Acacia Trees in Spring, this shift appears more pronounced in the present picture. The crop is tighter and gone is the structure provided by the trunks and branches of the acacia trees. Here, the branches are only faintly visible, and almost the entire surface is covered with rhythmical brushstrokes depicting the leaves. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that the present work dates from 1907, the year Larionov exhibited together with the symbolists of the Blue Rose group at the Stefanos exhibition, and before he joined the magazine Zolotoe Runo, edited by Nikolai Ryabushinsky, in early 1908. The painting Dawn, Blue Garden (fig.3), which was included in the Stefanos exhibition and is now at the State Tretyakov Gallery, shows a similarly tight crop with only a little sky showing. In the catalogue for the 2018 retrospective, it is dated to 1907.

As is often the case with Larionov, the present work is unsigned. The canvas has been lined, the original stretcher replaced with a more recent one, and any labels or inscriptions usually found on early works have been lost or obscured. The IR-photograph reveals, however, the inscription Larionow and the number 263 on the reverse of the original canvas in a carbon-based medium (fig.4).

Identical inscriptions in the same medium are found on the reverses of other paintings by Larionov, such as Le Verger, which is numbered 222 and inscribed Larionow below the vertical stretcher bar (fig.5). The reverse of Larionov’s Portrait of Tatlin, now at the Centre Pompidou, also bears the same inscription and the number 168 on the reverse, which is published in a 1995 exhibition catalogue (Nathalie S. Gontcharova, Michel F. Larionov et les collections du Museé national d’art moderne, Paris, 1995, p.58). This is also the case for many other works, including some which are by Goncharova and were, at one point, misattributed to Larionov (see, for example, the painting La Ville on page 54 of the same catalogue). It can, therefore, be assumed that these inscriptions were added after Larionov’s death, possibly by Tomilina.